Hillis 1
Madison Hillis
CSULB
Learning Assistance Center
April 29, 2010.
Training Tutors to Construct Skyscrapers
If you picture the process of how a skyscraper is built, construction must start with a firm foundation in order to ensure future stability. Many might underestimate the potential the building has to reach the sky, but as each floor is built, temporary structures called scaffolds reinforce every new wall and help the building grow in strength and size. With time and teamwork, the building can stand alone as a skyscraper.
Students come in for tutoring eager to become skyscrapers, but they assume that they are deficient in their capability to grow and that the tutor must have all of the answers. And without proper training, a new construction worker will misconceive their role of a tutor as a cheat sheet for completing homework, writing essays, and passing tests for their students. It would be scary to allow poorly trained construction workers to take on such a monumental job of building skyscrapers, imploring the necessity for training tutors.
Learning to Lay Foundations
Taking the time for tutor training provides our Learning Assistance Center with quality construction workers who know how to effectively lay each student’s unique foundations. As a
Master Tutor, I help train new tutors on the concepts and skills of active listening and critical questioning. Within this training, we stress the idea that it is through quality communication between the tutor and the student that progress can be made. During the training and tutoring

Hillis 2 sessions I conduct, I focus on the importance of learning each student’s background knowledge, learning obstacles, and learning styles to determine the unique foundation they need in order to succeed in their classes and to grow as independent learners.
Learning to Scaffold
After the new tutors learn the value of establishing a foundation of student learning, I emphasize the use of probing, prompting, and Bloom’s Taxonomy as scaffolds for leading students to answers themselves by tailoring how they present content based on a student’s style of learning and needs. Being exposed to Bloom’s Taxonomy throughout my training and through training new tutors helped me realize that tutoring involves stretching a student’s intellectual capacity by asking strategic questions of varying difficulty. In learning to ask more complex questions that involve analysis and application, the tutors I train promote deeper levels of understanding by providing students with a new lens through which to analyze content, and as a result, a new floor to their building of knowledge is constructed. Because I use different levels of questioning, I provide students with critical thinking skills that help them independently acquire knowledge and gain confidence in their potential to reach the sky.
Through tutor training, tutors learn to become those building scaffolds when they acquire skills like active listening and critical questioning techniques to pull the knowledge and confidence out of the students themselves. Tutor training refocuses the role of the tutor as a person who sees the potential of a struggling building to become a skyscraper and can provide the scaffolding needed to reach the top.